


Lives of Our Own

by CatieBrie



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Animal Death, Drug Abuse, Gen, Past Drug Use, Reckless Behavior
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-04
Updated: 2014-03-06
Packaged: 2018-01-14 12:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1266163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatieBrie/pseuds/CatieBrie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of small character sketches revolving around the people that have been drawn in by the enigma Sherlock Holmes and the days he changed their lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mycroft Holmes

Sherlock loves that dog, Red Beard. Truly and completely loves him and the dog loves him back like no child will. She is Sherlock’s only friend and Mycroft knows that love will only break his already fragile brother one day.

 

At the age of eight Sherlock has not quite learned to lock away his heart like Mycroft has and he earnestly tries to make friends but his brutal honesty and abundance of quirks and shining intelligence make him nothing but an outcast because children are cruel and it hurts Mycroft to watch his curly headed sibling come home from school with his head hung low and his shoulders rounded against invisible enemies. The only thing to ever rouse him from such depressions is the bundle of energy that is Red Beard and the way Sherlock's face lights up when she comes bounding towards him beautiful and painful and Mycroft wants to hurts the children that make such a look so very rare.

 

Mycroft really just wants to make it _right_ but he has already lost touch with how to properly comfort so instead he watches his brother grow more and more attached to their auburn-furred mutt and less and less willing to socialize with kids his own age. His parents see it too and they try to form play dates with other kids Sherlock’s age to help, but children are _cruel_ and it only serves to isolate him further.

 

Mycroft sees the signs of cancer in Red Beard before anyone else and not two years after they brought the dog home they have to put her down and what may have been left of the childish innocence and joy in a now ten-years-old Sherlock dies that day and Mycroft is heartbroken because now the two of them make a perfect pair and he never wanted that.

 

Not ever.

 


	2. Greg Lestrade

Greg meets Sherlock at what he considers to be his lowest point. He is a Detective Constable being kept from promotion by a boss who really does not like him and goes home to a wife with much of the same mindset; and who can tell how his daughter feels—the second she turned thirteen he became the bumbling, embarrassing father and he still has not figured that out.

 

He never wants to go home. Because, really, is it a home any more? So instead he drinks at a pub a few blocks away from his house in Brixton and attempts to forget about his day. This is normal, this is his life and while he isn’t convinced it’s the life he wants to live it is the one he’s stuck with.

 

So when he stumbles out of the pub, one pint too many unbalancing his step and a cigarette hanging between his lips, he doesn’t expect anything to change.

 

“You’re stuck without any hope of promotion, probably a Detective Constable for the CID, your home life is unsatisfactory and that has everything to do with the fact that your wife is cheating on you with a teacher from your child’s school. Spare a cigarette?”

 

Someday Greg will look back on this day he still will not regret the punch he throws.


	3. Sally Donovan

Sally hasn’t been a Detective Sergeant long but she has been one long enough to know of Sherlock Holmes. Her colleagues hate the man but from what she can tell he’s an invaluable asset and if Greg trusts him then she does too.

 

So when the Detective Inspector comes over to her desk and asks her to come with him to visit Sherlock’s home she’s more than eager to finally meet him; if she is going to prove she deserved her promotion she needs to know everything about her team and that includes their consultant... It takes her a minute to realize that Greg is tense and when he does not explain the situation on the ride over, but instead glares at the road with something bordering worry, she caves.

 

“What are we doing exactly?”

 

“Sherlock didn’t come in today,” he says after a moment. “He’s been in everyday for two months to harass me to let him have a case but I told him three months clean and then I’d gladly let him prove how lost we are without him, but not a day before.”

 

She’s taken aback by that. _Clean_? She thinks on that awhile and when they finally pull up to a series of flats she just stares at their dilapidated fronts. The inside isn’t much better: threadbare carpeting, water damage and peeling wallpaper. Greg stops at an unnumbered door and sets to banging on it immediately and calls out Sherlock’s name and then busts down the door when there is no response.

 

They make it just in time for Sherlock to shudder out one last breath and then his heart stops and the look of betrayal and fear on Greg’s face is enough for Sally to know that her superior will never be able to deal with this man objectively.

 

So she decides to do it for him and never allows herself to feel anything close to caring so that Greg can continue to do so.


	4. Molly Hooper

Molly graduates at the top of her class and is hired on as a junior pathologist at Bart’s almost immediately. Dr. Molly Hooper. The name sounds wonderful to her after all the grueling hours she has put towards the title and she is proud of it but she is even prouder of the respect she has garnered from her peers and it is good. All good.

 

“Miss Hooper.” The first time he addresses her that way she is angry and indignant but doesn’t correct him because that just isn’t done, throwing around your title. But then she sees him work and she finds herself so terribly smitten that he could call her Sarah or Kate and she would go along with it just to help, just to be close to his brilliance, to soak it all up because there is no one else like him around. And his cheekbones really are quite sexy, but that’s beside the point.

 

She learns from him even as she appears the ditz to everyone else, a silly little girl in a white coat playing doctor, but she is so much more.  She is invisible to him but since she is always there to observe she is the only one to notice just how lonely his is and it’s so sad because she will never be able to fill that void.

 

So she lets him call her Miss Hooper and hopes one day to really see him smile.


	5. John Watson

John has a British Army L106A1 tucked away in the drawer of his desk to keep himself from drowning. Some days he finds himself with the barrel pressed to his temple, riding the high of adrenaline that floods though him when he decides to flip the safety off. He carefully unloads the gun before his little ritual and then just as carefully loads it again before slipping it back into the desk drawer, because his need is not suicidal in nature but that of an addict pure and simple.

He pulled the trigger once when he had sunk particularly low and he will never tell anyone how fantastic that had felt, but damn.

He leads a boring life aside from that, and really, that is the problem. After the rush of war, civilian life is nothing but a shadowy existence he is far from content with. Nightmares keep him up at night, PTSD keeps him edgy and he cannot go a day without second guessing the motives of those around him but that hardly makes his life interesting. He cannot find that spice that he craves, that he _needs_ to change his life from mindlessly moving from one day to the next to actually living and that is slowly killing him.

He never sees the day that turns his life around coming.

“John, is that you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last character short I had planned, and my personal favorite, they all were roughly chronological and pre-ASiP.
> 
> Anyway, I had fun with this and hope you enjoyed! I'll be posting a longer piece soon, but I want to make sure I have chapters already written before I do so so I don't end up behind.

**Author's Note:**

> These little stories are helping me grasp how I want to portray these characters in a couple of larger works I have set aside and really it's to test the water too since I have never written Sherlock fanfiction...
> 
> I already have a drabble for each character listed but after those are posted I'll be open to prompts.
> 
> Cheers!


End file.
